Because women\u2019s roles in the mafia have been so profoundly underestimated, often both by the authorities and by the men who run their criminal organisations, it has proven a catalyst for the same women to gain power (legal restrictions on prison visits, for example, mean that wives and close female relatives are some of the only people to be able to communicate with imprisoned bosses and convey their orders). Conversely, it often means women can provide a great deal of information to anti-mafia prosecutors should they turn state witness. In Marco Amanta\u2019s Diario di una siciliana ribelle, or One Girl Against the Mafia (1998), a remarkable documentary sharing the diaries of mob boss daughter Rita Atria and her decision at only seventeen to speak to the authorities, the inherent dangers are obvious. As Atria herself put it: in Palermo, where she grew up, you would sooner kill your best friend than talk to the police. Anywhere else, that might be hyperbole. The knock-on effects of breaking that silence can\u2019t be understated, and since the Italian version of the witness protection programme has only existed since 1991, there are far too many cases of information leaking and informants being killed. Atria did not survive, nor did she expect to, but she did take down dozens of high-ranking mafiosi, shocking authorities with her deep insider knowledge and even uncovering the gang-ordered killing of a politician.
I\u2019ve never been one to argue that cinema should maintain complete fidelity to reality, or that accurate representation should be king. My favourite movies are transportive, mythological, ambiguous, even fantastical - and god knows the last thing we need now is more literal-minded, didactic art. But the disparity between reality and fiction, as quite troublingly laid bare by \u2018Donne di Mafia\u2019, is enough to give anyone pause. It\u2019s a much-needed corrective to what outsiders think we understand about this world and its complexities. It reminds us that The Godfather\u2019s old quote about dangerous women is truer than we all probably thought, but in ways many of us had never begun to imagine.
Frontex said that crossings in the dangerous central Mediterranean Sea have more than doubled in the first two months of this year, with more than 12,000 irregular crossings. Last month alone, the numbers tripled from a year ago, to 7,000.
A spokesperson for UNESCO, the United Nations body that designates and protects World Heritage sites, did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment on the reason why Venice, a World Heritage site since 1987, remains off the endangered list.
The "in danger" label aims to encourage the better preservation of the site for the future. In exceptional circumstances a site can be stripped of its World Heritage label if the steps are deemed unsatisfactory.
In a related recommendation announced Monday, UNESCO said its experts believed Australia needed more time to boost protection of the Great Barrier Reef before it was declared "in danger" due to the risk of damage from climate change.
And most European governments are still keeping their eyes well shut. They could reduce the number of people risking the fiercely dangerous journey across the central Mediterranean, by providing visas for people fleeing conflict who wish to seek protection in Europe, and by allowing more refugees to resettle in host countries and reuniting them with their families.
What happens when a working-class boy in an Italian American family in the Bronx begins to love reading and gets absorbed in the world of books? This essay explores the fears and the hopes raised in one family in the mid-1960s and the ambivalence of success American-style. When books are scarce, they arrive with an aura around them of promise and danger, like visitors from another place and time. The article takes up the possibility that reading may represent betrayal, albeit perhaps a necessary one, and suggests that to become a scholar from a working-class background comes with pain, and that this pain may become a source of conceptual insight.
Over the next 24 hours, according to the JRC EFFIS, the fire danger forecast is high to extreme over most of Sardinia Region; according to the Italian national warning system the fire danger forecast values are slightly decreasing.
A more important question is not whether Trump is an American Mussolini, but if American democracy is as vulnerable to fascistic erosion as Italian democracy was. My research on how Italian immigrants helped shape U.S. foreign policy toward fascist Italy reveals that Italians exiled by Mussolini believed America was also in danger.
Recent news reports quoted Nicola Gratteri, a respected Italian anti-mafia prosecutor, as having said that the pope's drive to reform the Catholic Church was making organized-crime members \"nervous.\" He added, \"I cannot say if the organization is in a position to do something like this, but they are dangerous and it is worth reflecting on.\"
Urban life was often filled with hazards for the new immigrant, and housing could be one of the greatest dangers. At the turn of the century more than half the population of New York City, and most immigrants, lived in tenement houses, narrow, low-rise apartment buildings that were usually grossly overcrowded by their landlords. Cramped, poorly lit, under ventilated, and usually without indoor plumbing, the tenements were hotbeds of vermin and disease, and were frequently swept by cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis. The investigative journalist Jacob Riis, himself a Danish immigrant, launched a public campaign to expose and eradicate the exploitative housing new immigrants were forced to endure.
Immigrants' work places could be as unhealthy as their homes. A substantial number of southern Italian immigrants had only worked as farmers, and were thus qualified only for unskilled, and more dangerous, urban labor. Many Italians went to work on the growing city's municipal works projects, digging canals, laying paving and gas lines, building bridges, and tunneling out the New York subway system. In 1890, nearly 90 percent of the laborers in New York's Department of Public Works were Italian immigrants.
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